Overview

"Despite 50 years of literature documenting the experience and meanings of countertransference in analytic practice, the concept remains a source of controversy. How may countertransference best be understood? In what ways does it impede or facilitate the analyst's activity. Does it serve diagnostic understanding or merely reflect the analyst's own intrusive subjectivity? For Peter Carnochan, such questions can be answered only by revisiting historical, epistemological, and moral issues intrinsic to the analytic enterprise. This study is an attempt to provide a comprehensive understanding of countertransference on the basis of a contemporary reappraisal of just such foundational assumptions. Carnochan begins by reviewing the history of the psychoanalytic encounter and how it has been accompanied by changes in the understanding of countertransference. He delineates the complexities that underlie Freud's apparent prescription of countertransference before tracing the broadening of the concept in the hands of later theorists. Part II examines the problem of epistemology in contemporary analytic practice. For Carnochan, rejection of objectivist accounts of knowing need not lead to an untenable relativism. The answer to this apparent quandary, he holds, resides in a contemporary appreciation of affect, which, rather than merely limiting or skewing perception, forms an essential ""promontory"" for human knowing. The final section of the book takes up what Carnochan terms the ""moral architecture"" of psychoanalysis. Rejecting the claim that analysis operates in a realm outside conventional accounts of value, he argues that the analytic alternative to traditional moralism is not tantamount to emancipation from the problem of morality. Clarification of countertransference and its role in analytic therapy, in turn, follows from understanding and acceptance of the moral frame within which the analyst operates. By way of rendering this frame explicit, Carnochan returns to the moral ground on which analysis was founded and then examines how this ground has evolved over the course of a century of analytic practice."

Full Product Details

Author:   Peter G. M. Carnochan
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Analytic Press,U.S.
Volume:   21
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 3.40cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.960kg
ISBN:  

9780881633245

ISBN 10:   0881633240
Pages:   432
Publication Date:   01 May 2001
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Atlas's Perch. Freud and the Advent of Psychoanalysis. Freud: Gratification, Virtue, and the Therapeutic Process. Freud: Reality Testing and the Pleasure Principle. The Evolution of Psychoanalytic Technique after Freud. The Move to Modernity. Knowing and Analysis. Verification and Disclosure. Stillness and Provision: Theories of Virtue in Psychoanalytic Practice. Constructed Virtue: The Architecture of Psychoanalytic Morality.

Reviews

Looking for Ground is a sophisticated, theoretically rich revisiting of some old and beloved haunts - neutrality, abstinence, analytic subjectivity, and cure by love - in order to get a new purchase on the question of therapeutic action. By appreciating the virtues of a wide range of clinical strategies in countertransference work, this book has the potential to take the field of clinical psychoanalysis beyond the reductive opposition of analytic disclosure and analytic deprivation. - Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., Author, Gender as Soft Assembly (Analytic Press, 2005) It is a valuable, extensive, and comprehensive exposition of the history, development, theories, and practice of psychoanalysis...Carnochan has made a contribution that is modern and controversial. While he surely is not the last word on countertransference, his book should stimulate valuable discussion of a much neglected topic. - Ernest S. Wolf, M.D., Psychoanalytic Quarterly There can be little doubt that the subject of countertransference has moved to center stage in current psychoanalytic discourse. This shift raises extraordinary challenges involving epistemology, technique, and theory. In this superb new contribution, Peter Carnochan addresses those challenges. With meticulous scholarship and admirable even-handedness, he investigates the implications of our current emphasis on countertransference for contemporary psychoanalysis. Both candidates and experienced analysts will find this book a valuable resource. - Glen O. Gabbard, M.D., The Menninger Clinic Looking for Ground is a brilliantly conceived, thoroughly researched, and superbly written historical-conceptual study of psychoanalytic technique that becomes profoundly illuminating of psychoanalysis in general. One might have thought there were no new, imaginative ways to approach the historical and conceptual issues involved in psychoanalytic technique and, more specifically, in the actual participation of the analyst in the treatment process. But the author of this book has accomplished just that! By choosing countertransference and its vicissitudes as the thread around which to organize his novel insights about the analyst's role and function in treatment, he found the ground he was looking for. Carnochan presents his ideas in a narrative that is not only clinically and philosophically sophisticated but also highly readable. He is at the cutting edge of contemporary psychoanalysis and takes the reader along on his exciting journey. - Paul H. Ornstein, M.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, University of Cincinnati

<p> Looking for Ground is a sophisticated, theoretically rich revisiting of some old and beloved haunts - neutrality, abstinence, analytic subjectivity, and cure by love - in order to get a new purchase on the question of therapeutic action. By appreciating the virtues of a wide range of clinical strategies in countertransference work, this book has the potential to take the field of clinical psychoanalysis beyond the reductive opposition of analytic disclosure and analytic deprivation. <p>- Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., Author, Gender as Soft Assembly (Analytic Press, 2005)<p> It is a valuable, extensive, and comprehensive exposition of the history, development, theories, and practice of psychoanalysis...Carnochan has made a contribution that is modern and controversial. While he surely is not the last word on countertransference, his book should stimulate valuable discussion of a much neglected topic. <p>- Ernest S. Wolf, M.D., Psychoanalytic Quarterly<p> There can be little doubt that the

Author Information

Peter G. M. Carnochan, Ph.D., is a psychologist in private practice in San Francisco. He studied philosophy at Harvard University and is currently a candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He has written articles on the development of emotion and cognition, and presented psychoanalytic papers at American Psychological Association conferences. Dr. Carnochan has served as the associate editor of the Psychologist Psychoanalyst and currently serves on the board of the Childhood and Adolescence Section of the Psychoanalysis Division of the APA.

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